Sunday, August 26, 2018

Is It Ok For Woman To Be Ordained In To The Ministry And What About The Books of Enoch and Maccabees?

Question: Brother I have Two questions, 1. Do you seriously think it is O.K. for women to be ordained into the ministry, cause the way I see it in the Bible and have been taught in the past by my pastor it excluded them.

2. I recently been in discussion with this gentlemen about the books of Enoch and Maccabees, they truly believe these’s books are divine and have been taken out of the Bible, I use king James version they think this Bible is not complete.

Answer: Greetings in Jesus wonderful name!

1. REGARDING WOMEN IN MINISTRY: Let me clearly tell you, that I believe in the ordination of a woman who is called by God, as much as in the ordination of a man who is called by God (Heb 5:4).

Unless a person is gifted by God, none can do the work of ministry for the Lord (Eph 4:11). When Jesus ascended, He gave gifts to men which means it is Jesus who decides who should be in ministry of public speaking and who should be in other parts of the ministry behind the scenes (1 Cor 12:22-25).

So digging deep we come to see the most important thing for a ministry is the outpouring of the Spirit which Jesus told all apostles to wait for after which He let them start their ministry from their city, extending to their district, and then their state, and then their nation and then finally in to all the nations around the world to preach the Gospel and teach the Word of God, in it Jesus made no gender distinction in receiving the Spirit which is represented with the phrase "all flesh" (Acts 2:17), then Jesus foretold that our "sons and daughters" will prophesy and the only code of conduct implemented for women while doing this activity within the Church is to cover their head as revealing to angels on high that a symbol of authority is presiding over them, while men need not do it as they are under Christ (1 Cor 11:3-11). This prophetic utterance can come only by the divine inspiration of God and is no mean thing, when God promises and calls his servants equally without gender differences saying, "My menservants" as well as "My maidservants", as those who shall prophesy (Acts 2:18). When God Himself treats equally both gender in ministerial area, and says to treat equally women as well as men who are gifted to prophecy, who are we to stop them from doing the work of the Lord against the will of God.

That is why we see so many unique woman of God in every generation who did great things for the Lord through preaching the Gospel, teaching the Word of God and becoming great missionaries to distant land where people were living in ignorance, curses and sins of darkness, thus being a light and making a difference in times past and present.

Having said all the above things, I also believe that women should follow the Divine order that God has set in the Church to learn the word of God from mature men or their husband and become mature in their ministry outreach. Also it is not good for them to exercise authority over men, because easily they have the chance to get deceived when they are not in submission to mature men of God (1 Tim 2:11-14). The primary purpose of a woman is to "manage the house" (1 Tim 5:14) and within it the priority is that all "4 ...young women [should learn to] love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed." (Tit 2:4-5). Once they have done these things and become old and mature in their character, they become empowered to admonish other young women to Godliness and maturity (Tit 2:3). Once submission to husband is perfected, "the hidden beauty of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit" becomes so precious in the sight of God that He starts to rejoice over them (Eph 5:22; 1 Pet 3:4; Prov 5:18). There after He opens a lot of opportunity for them to minister for the Glory of God to children, women and the Church at large even to men if God has called and have gifted certain women to use them uniquely. Women operating in the ministry and being ordained is not a principle, but it is indeed a exception when it comes to public ministry over everyone including men. Certainly even in the Old Testament times God used some humble women in the ministry of leadership, yet they never dared to rule over men but rather served all people in humbleness even when there were need to serve men in public ministry for God's sake.

2. REGARDING THE CANON OF 66 BOOKS OF THE BIBLE: When it come to the books of Enoch and Maccabees, and even the other books which the Roman Catholic church adds to the Old Testament Hebrew Bible in which it was not originally present, they call it as deuterocanonical [i.e. (of sacred books or literary works) forming a secondary canon], but we as protestants consider them apocryphal [which means 'writings not forming part of the accepted canon of Scripture, (of a story or statement) of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true.'] The reason we do consider books like these as dubious is because they do contain teachings that are contrary to the core fundamental doctrine of salvation in which we stand (i.e.) only by grace, only through faith and only through Christ, in other words we believe faith plus nothing leads us to salvation and that is the same way we keep the salvation without adding works of any kind to keep us saved until the end of our life on earth. We are saved not by good works, but for good works that God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them for the Glory of God and to inherit the eternal reward waiting for us in heaven which are the treasures we collect in heaven for our earthly service and sacrifice (Eph 2:10; Matt 6:19-21).

The Catholics have 46 Old Testament books rather than the 39 found in our Bibles. The apocrypha was not in the Hebrew canon. There are reputed to be 263 quotations and 370 allusions to the Old Testament in the New Testament, and not one of them refers to the Apocryphal books. It was actually not until 367 AD that the church father Athanasius first provided the complete listing of the 66 books belonging to the canon.

(i) He distinguished those from other books that were widely circulated and he noted that those 66 books were the ones, and the only ones, universally accepted.

(ii) The point is that the formation of the canon did not come all at once like a thunderbolt, but was the product of centuries of reflection.

The Church Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419), listed the apocrypha as Scripture. Since these same councils also finalized the 66 canonical books which all Christians accept, they must accept them all.

The Books of the Old Testament "Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther" were always included in the "history collection" of Jewish books and "Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon" were always included in the "poetry collection", but none of the apocryphal books were ever quoted in the New Testament. Not even once! While Jesus and His apostles often quoted from the Septuagint [i.e. a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), including the Apocrypha, made for Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC and adopted by the early Christian Churches], they never quoted from the Apocrypha.

Some would like to reason out saying, because Jude cites the apocryphal book of Enoch (Jude 14, 15), they say that the very book as a whole has come by Divine inspiration, to that I say, just because Paul cites the name of the magicians of Pharaoh who opposed Moses, all the Egyptian literature's cannot become Divinely inspired books and therefore cannot be added to the mainstream as it is outside the canon (2 Tim 3:8). These names are not mentioned in the Old Testament. From the above we learn that when the Biblical writers write from extra Biblical sources outside of Canon, they are appealing to the culture of the times they lived in who knew it well, and that does not give any special divine inspiration or authenticity to the source they refer to unless it is directly taken from the canonized Hebrew Scripture.

The King James Version (KJV), also known as the King James Bible (KJB) or simply the Authorized Version (AV), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, begun in 1604 and completed in 1611. This original King James Bible included all the books from the Septuagint, including what are called the Deuterocanonical books - the Apocrypha.

King James gave the translators instructions intended to ensure that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of, and reflect the episcopal structure of, the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin.

You using King James Version is the closest to the original Septuagint which Jesus and the apostles used, and without diluting the basic structure and words, you can read in the contemporary language in (NKJV) which means New King James Version. By the late 1700s, British printings of the KJV typically excluded the Deuterocanonical books as well, as the Church of England become more explicitly Protestant. Sometimes we need to understand fully the history of Apocrypha to actually reject such extra Biblical sources, which can lead people who believe it in to deception. God provided canon to purify His holy Word from man made unholy doctrines of the devilish deceptions. So let those who understand, let them understand more for the Glory of God. Those who are deceived, let them be deceived more (Rev 22:11-12).

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